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Austrian police locked down the grounds of Vienna's Schönbrunn Palace on Monday morning, after a jogger told them he'd spotted a lion which he believed must have escaped from the zoo.

16 police officers responded to the call at around 7.30am, shutting down the palace gardens and searching the area. However, the hunt was called off shortly afterwards when it was established that all the zoo's big cats were safely in their enclosures.

"The zoo's employees counted all the big cats, and none were missing,” police spokesman Paul Eidenberger told the Heute newspaper. A spokeswoman for Schönbrunn Zoo, Johanna Bukovsky, confirmed that this was the case: "We realised very quickly that this was a false alarm, as our employees were able to check all the enclosures.”

It's not clear if the jogger pulled an ill-advised hoax, or perhaps just needs his eyes testing.